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7.8 What portal owners

7.8 What portal owners are measuring Every portal owner we interviewed told us they were able to measure basic things, such as the number of datasets on the portal, downloads and site visitors. They could not measure usage, partially because the extent of Open Data usage could be unclear. All portal owners used CKAN as their portal software, with the exception of Bath:Hacked who use Socrata. Some portal owners were also able to capture additional metrics, such as: metadata quality (using a metadata checker) which countries visitors come from which browsers they use which data they check which data they download which data provider has the most hits ‘success metrics’ such as the number of events they had run Company Example Method Available Reference CKAN data.gov.uk Google analytics extension, API provision yes Link Socrata New York City portal API provision yes Link Datapress London data portal Based on CKAN but with features like common search terms, GeoIP of users, user's industry or segmented popular downloads TBC internal Figure 10: Automated metrics provided by data portal software 101 101 CKAN, SOCRATA, DataPress 66

Figure 11: Screenshot of data.gov.uk site analytics dashboard 102 7.9 What portal owners want to measure Every portal owner we spoke to for this report told us they wanted to be able to measure re-use in order to understand impact. A typical response was, ‘we want to know who is using our data and what for. We want to know about apps built off the back of our data.’ The Norwegian portal owner summed up the situation: “We only have click rates and download rates. We can’t get use from that – only if you have APIs. I compare it with a telephone book: if I get your number from a book, the telephone book is not aware of how many times I use your number. We know number of apps because we invite them to tell us.” Another told us they ‘would like to focus on how data is re-used’ and were developing an API for tracking this. Owners told us about several methods for trying to capture re-use, such as an initiative by Datacampfire.com to capture stories, and experimental projects to monitor and trawl twitter for reuse cases. However most portal owners settled with asking users to tell them when they reused data from the portal to make things, because there were not suitable automated metrics available. Several explained that there was a tension between wanting to understand users and their needs and wanting to reduce barriers to accessing data as much as possible. 102 UK Open Data Portal, Site-usage 67